[Your name is Regulus. Regulus Raed Locke.]
[You are currently twenty-three, and your birthday is on the fifth day of the First month.]
[You are a student at A University. You study pre-med, but you first started with linguistics.]
[And...]
I stared directly at nowhere in particular. Maybe the plain colorless wall in front of me. The hospital room was drenched in pure, bleak white that was stained with the occasional acidified brownish yellow caused by aging.
There was a set of wooden chairs and desk nearby, but one of the two chairs had fallen on the ground at some point when I was in my coma.
The person lying on the bed—as seen in the reflection in the window—followed every movement made by me. Every little tremor my hands made, every tremble my pupils conducted; the dark, wavy hair that morphed with the dent of the pillow I once laid on, a curious bed-hair as result. It could have only been me.
I glanced at the calendar: it was the twenty-fourth day of the seventh month.
There was no one in the room besides me, and...
This grating, robotic voice in my head.
Its voice was slightly hesitant as the words echoed in my mind.
[You, Regulus Locke, have courted death and won their heart.]
[However, life wanted you more.]
[Life was in love with you, just as death was.]
[And, so, through multiple hardships, you have evolved into a greater type of human.]
[A human that will live under "life."]
[A human that can live through this story once more.]
There was a silence wherein only the rush of the air outside clattered on the window.
A human that will live under "life?"
What a redundant sentence.
The sentence that came next made sense, but only slightly.
I attempted to stay calm, but there were too many questions I wished to be answered.
I took a deep breath.
When I attempted to talk, the feeling was unusual.
I readied myself with an even deeper breath, and my heart began to ache from the drastic amount of air it was receiving all at once.
It was strange to talk to myself.
"Is that story fiction?"
The tongue I spoke with was unfamiliar. This wasn’t...what language did I speak with before my comatose? I was unable to recall.
This voice...
I could feel this voice in my head nod.
"Knew it," I said, sighing. "In the first place, how could the likes of me—"
I stopped talking at once.
And then it hit me like a train.
There was a humongous crater in the land known as my memories, void and erased and lacking of what should have been my past. It was as though a meteor had come and destroyed that piece of land.
[Regulus understood at once.]
The voice in my head said simply.
I crossed my arms.
For some reason, I was oddly wary of the voice in my head.
And so, I slid off the bed—
"Urgh..!"
—falling in the process, my head hitting the wooden desk and seat.
My joints were in excruciating pain, which made sense if we put it into account that I was in a coma for so long.
I groaned as I attempted to stretch my legs, cracking sounds reverberating.
With the loud sound that occurred when I fell down, I began to wonder when the nurses or staff would come to check on me.
Perhaps my family would come to check on me?
A lover, even...
The thought of it elated me just slightly.
It wasn’t just the thought of having a lover, no. It was also the fact that I might have a family out there worried for me.
I scrambled off the floor and ended up hitting my head on the bottom of the desk again.
This time, something fell off.
Like a feather, it slowly descended down on the tiled floor that was just as white as the walls.
And, as though the floor was a shallow pond, it fell into a ripple.
Of course, the poeticness of it all was just imagination.
I picked up the folded piece of paper which was textured. I noticed that it was made of animal skin, as most parchment paper were once made in the bygone past.
It was folded two times, lengthwise then crosswise.
The paper was yellowed and acidified, with the smell of an old lady or old leather.
There were droplets of where liquid had dribbled down on.
It took some time to get used to moving once again. This was the same feeling I had when speaking once again.
The nimble movement of my fingers was too complicated for me, but I managed to unfold it nevertheless.
There were specks of ink that bled through the folded parchment.
Who even still used dip pens in this time and age?
With that in mind, I analyzed the text.
The text itself was written in a language I had recognized, but knew that it was not what I was familiar with beforehand. It was written in Infernic script.
The script was akin to the Latin alphabet, but it had more possibilities such as writing vertically in cursive.
I was quite impressed with the penmanship; it made me wonder who had written it. Perhaps it was a message from the past me to be received by the current me?
That, however, caused more confusion.
Did the past me know that I would end up in a coma?
I didn’t like that thought.
I eyed the writing, my finger swiping as I read it.
The penmanship was written in a grotesque manner, like it was written with terror in the writer’s mind. What I thought were specks of ink—I had noticed when I managed to whiff a smell of it—was actually aged and dried blood.
The ink written with it...could it have been blood as well?
I shuddered while sprawled on the ground, feeling a cold sensation slithering down my spine.
["Do not look back."]